I'm curious if anyone has ever felt discriminated against by Google. Google is famously secretive about the revenue share for Adsense customers, and have also banned people for disclosing how much they make. It seems to me because of this that they could choose to pay different webmasters different rates for displaying the same ads, and no one would ever know. Further, they could use illegal criteria (such as race, religion, etc) to determine who gets what. This question arose because a friend of mine and I recently put together web pages that were identical in content for a college class, and put some adsense ads on them. We hosted them at completely different hosts. The problem? He was yielding over 3X the revenue per click that I was getting. We had similiar amounts of traffic, identical content - just about everything was the same. The only difference between us is that he has a very Indian (the country) sounding name, and I have a very American-sounding name. Could this really be? I'm not suggesting that Google itself has some grand scheme, but perhaps employees within it give "a leg up" to their countrymen just because they can.
Anytime people are getting really low clicks for a length of time they will cliam they are being discriminated. They forget that there is a more logical reason: SMARTPRICING.
Ever think that Google may have flagged your site as a copy of your friends site and slammed you with smart pricing?
When I said "Identical in Content" they weren't exact copies of each other - just communicated the same idea. We examined the ads, and they were actually displaying the same ads from the same advertisers.
It just must be down to either your site being crap or being unlucky but discrimination because of your name/religion/race? Now thats what I call taking 'evil Google' to the next level.
Or being more targetted traffic. We could list a hundred possible reasons why you are getting a lower rate.
As I said in the post, I didn't say that Google itself was doing anything - I said that both of us, even my friend who was the beneficiary of this, feel that the employees might. There are real humans that work there, and some of them might have human tendencies. I was just asking a question...given all of the contractually-obligated secrecy, and then this incident, it makes some sense. Whenever you have a massive company telling people that they need to be quiet about what they make or get sued, and who refuses to divulge any details whatsoever about how they determine who gets what, questions should at least be asked.
If you feel that you have been discriminated against by an employee of Google then I would suggest you seek legal advice. I would suggest researching on how Google determines what amount a publisher gets paid for given clicks before jumping to wild assumptions about rouge Google employees.